Recently a mystery was solved for me
I was talking to North Cambridge Stabilization Committee clerk Michael Brandon about the former Rounder Records complex on Massachusetts Avenue just north of Linear Park.
As we reported last month, developer Greg Cohen recently purchased the Rounder site with the hope of, among other things, redesigning the small plaza on the southwest-side of the site to create a public space that is congenial to pedestrian accessible retail.
“Maybe this will be the vibrant crossroads we were expecting Trolley Square to be,” Brandon said.
The veil was lifted from my eyes.
I have been covering North Cambridge zoning and development issues for close to a year now, and most of what I had fallen into a familiar formula of community activists and concerned residents, with inconsistent support from the city, struggling to oppose sloppy efforts by developers to circumvent zoning ordinance.
There has been an air of desperation to the proceedings - defensive actions by the community where the best possible outcome is things staying the same.
But apparently I had been missing half of the story until now.
The short version of the other half is that in 2001 the city acquired a 37,645 square foot parcel at the corner of Massachusetts and Cameron Avenues from the MBTA.
Two separate committee reports, spearheaded by the NCSC in 1996 and the Cambridge Community Development Department in 2002, respectively, recommended that development of the site be balanced between public space and affordable housing.
The final CDD report recommended that 30 percent to 50 percent of the site be developed as open space and that local retail serving the needs of the neighborhood, such as a café, pharmacy, or bike shop, be included on the ground floor of the buildings facing Massachusetts Avenue.
Only one retail space was included in the final design. While a few folks who I talked to expressed fears that it would be leased by a national chain, Richard J. Diamond of the Diamond Group, which is leasing the space, said they are in negotiations with local food service interests.
“We have a couple of interested parties. They are not national and they are not chains,” he said.
Brandon said for obscure reasons involving duplicity on the part of the city manager’s office and violations of the public meeting laws, the site was handed over to Homowner’s Rehab Inc, and developed with 32 affordable housing units, and eight affordable home ownership units. The layout left room for only 36,000 square feet of park space at the northwest corner of the lot. Together with the adjoining Linear Park, the square footage of the park is 10.62 percent of the area of the site, a far cry from the amount of open space envisioned by the CDD and community members.
North Cambridge resident and City Councillor Craig A. Kelley said the entire Trolley Square process is indicative of systematic failure in the city’s community planning process.
Because of poor planning that did not take the concerns of the community seriously, they ended up with a park that is essentially a drainage area for the site, he said.
“The park is a sad joke, the process was a sad joke, and the city refuses to learn,” he said.
Although he thinks it is unlikely to happen, Kelley, who for 10 years was the leader of the NCSC, said there needs to be a serious discussion, at the council level, of the community planning process.
“I think we should have a solid discussion about the process and how we got where we are,” he said.
Assistant City Manager for Community Development Beth Rubenstein said she would not comment on Kelley’s observations.
Brandon said that insult has been added to injury for the community at every turn.
For example, there is ostensibly a community space in the complex, but, Brandon said, it has not been made available to the public, he said.
“It has not been made readily available to the community and it has not been furnished in a way that would accommodate broad community uses,” he said.
Rubenstein said that she was unfamiliar with concerns about access to the community space.
“That’s not ringing a bell,” she said.
Last May, though, the city council did approve an order requesting that city manager’s office, provide whatever financial assistance is legal and necessary to ensure that the community and retail spaces at the Trolley Square development best fit the needs of the surrounding North Cambridge community and that appropriate uses are not limited by lack of funding for either rental costs or fitting out expenses.
That order remains on the city council docket, awaiting a response from the city manager, to this day.
To be fair, the CMO has scores of orders pertaining to various issues all over the city to respond to, and when I asked Kelley about this one in particular he did not remember it either.
Brandon said he is complaining that the Homeowners Rehab, which is a non-profit corporation federally- funded through the City of Cambridge Community Development Block Grant, is now petitioning the city to take over the small parcel allocated for open space and use it as handicap access to the site.
In the process they are proposing to cut down a number of trees in the park.
“If I were a private developer and I came in and said, ‘oh wow, I want to cut down trees in a public park because I didn’t plan properly for access and fire safety,’ I don’t think that would fly,” he said.
The city is cutting down three trees in the park area, Rubenstein said, one at the request of the fire department, one because it is impairing the lighting at the park at night, and one because it is dead.
They also planted 14 new trees in the adjoining Linear Park, Rubenstein said.
So it is an open question whether sometimes some of the monsters Brandon and the North Cambridge Stabilization Committee go after are actually wind-mills.
But they are fighting the good fight to preserve what they can from the Trolley Square debacle, in the hopes that they can somehow cobble together some version of the neighborhood common they initially envisioned for the site.
And there is a chance now that Greg Cohen of Coda Development and his architect Peter Quinn might be in a position to aid them in making a scaled back version of their dream for the square a reality.
Cohen recently bought the Rounder Records complex, he intends to redevelop it mostly as office space, but he also intends to include four units of pedestrian-accessible retail space facing out onto the twenty foot-wide plaza at the intersection of Cameron and Massachusetts avenues, just north of the park at the Trolley Square site.
Included in the plan that Quinn drew up is a proposal redesign a portion of the plaza to accommodate pedestrian access to the retail space.
They will cut six feet into the plaza, Quinn said, and re-landscape it, opening it up to pedestrian traffic, and getting rid of shrubbery that he described as prosaic.
He was quick to add that they do not have plans to cut down any trees.
Overall, Quinn said, the effect will be like a smaller version of the plaza that anchors Davis Square, a few blocks down the bike path.
“It would open that space up to a little bit of life, right now it’s a dead zone,” he said.
He said that right now all of their plans for the Rounder site are still in the preliminary stages.
As far as the building itself is concerned, they will be meeting with neighbors a few more times before they even take up the city permitting process in earnest, he said.
And they do not even know yet whom they need to work with in order to get permission to renovate the plaza. Quinn said that he thought that it was MBTA property, but he was not sure.
Regardless, though, this site’s proximity to the Trolley Square park presents a great opportunity for the city to support North Cambridge community interests.
They should do everything they can to work in good faith with the community and with Rounder developers to make sure that future design proposals for the plaza and for the Trolley Square park on the south side of Cameron Avenue are considered in conjunction, and they should take these considerations into account when they act on their promise to build raised the crossings at Cameron and Lincoln streets.
The result could be a small but open and lively version of the neighborhood crossroads that North Cambridge residents have been working for all these years.
And if residents are seriously interested in making this happen, an opportunity to let the city know is coming up this spring.
Stewart Dash of the Community Development Department said that, as part of the upcoming North Cambridge Neighborhood Study Update, three public meetings will be held in March, April, and May to get public input on issues zoning, land use, urban, design transportation, housing, economic development and open space.
Brandon said that, given the city’s track record of disregarding residents concerns, he does not have high hopes for the review.
He said a parallel citizen-initiated zoning rezoning petition may be in the works.
But here is hoping that such drastic measures will not be necessary and that the city will take all of North Cambridge residents’ concerns and desires seriously.
In other news, Jan 19, after eight months of negotiations, George H. Katis of Stone River Properties finally closed the deal on the Ritorante Marino site.
The official price tag for the property was $1.875 million but sources say that the cost, including brokerage fees, the liquor license and equipment costs, was in the $2.4 million range.
He plans to lease the site to Central Kitchen co-owner and head chef Gary Strack, who will open a new family oriented Italian restaurant named Bam-Bachi there.
Katis said that Strack is still getting his financing together for the new restaurant, but now that the property is secure, he will start urging his future tenant to move forward.
“Its all up to him now,” Katis said.
Close watchers of North Cambridge development politics probably already know that, after years of stone walling, Cambridge City Council down-zoned the former Marino site.
Due to what was officially described as a clerical error, the property had escaped down-zoning to when the North Massachusetts Avenue Overlay district was created in 1990, changing North Massachusetts Avenue from high- to low-intensity mixed use.
It is speculated by close watchers that Katis’ bid on the property, which he made it clear from the beginning he had no intention of redeveloping, was part of the reason that the down-zoning finally went through.
One last note, part of a front wall and gaping hole is still all that remains at 56 Churchill Ave. where a historically significant 148-year-old home stood until last February.
In June, Albert J. Benedetti was given the go ahead to build three townhouses on the lot, but almost six months later there has been no visible work done to the site. Inspectional services has apparently visited the site a couple of times, but the outcome of those visits is not ours to say, as calls to the department have gone unreturned.
Renee Chandonnet of 4 Matignon Road did say that she say Benedetti at the site with NStar workers when she was home on Martin Luther King Day.
One can only hope that this is a sign, albeit a tenuous one, that somewhere someone in the City bureaucracy is encouraging someone to act responsibly and do right by the residents of North Cambridge.
Thoughts? e-mail me: davidtaber@thealewife.com
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